Twitter - I just don't get it.

In class last night, we spent a couple minutes watching a You Tube video about how Twitter works – the video was clearly produced by Twitter to show how, as a loyal Twitter-er, you can let the people who care the most about you know what you’re doing minute by minute between phone calls and emails.

I have already experienced a little weirdness in this respect from my new Facebook account. The other day, my sister introduced me to the word “chillax” – I know, corny, but she’s in high school, and high schoolers like to make up strange words and use them incessantly. After our conversation, I updated my Facebook status to: “Julie is chillaxing.” The next day at work, several co-workers came up to me and asked me if I had a good night chillaxing. One co-worker even asked me where I heard that great new word that he now wants to incorporate into his daily vocabulary.

This little run-in left me with two impressions. One, people like reading status updates. Two, be careful what you write up there because not only are people reading them, but they absorb, store in their long-term memory and save for later mundane conversation by the coffee maker. I'll even admit that when I’m having a really slow evening at home, I will check status updates of certain people who are particularly funny or who are blood-related.

Despite this, the idea of Twitter still confounds me. I cannot think of a single person whose Twitter account I would want to follow. I cannot think of anyone who I would want to follow me! Even my mom, who I would think would be the most interested person in my every move, could probably care less that I: am at the grocery store, am home from the grocery store, am walking the dog, am bored, etc.

In fact, when I really think about it, the whole concept of Twitter is narcissistic. Who am I to think that anyone really cares about what I do all day long? A random chick’s blog I follow that has a pretty loyal readership recently posted recently about how she has 1,000 people following her on Twitter. Ew. She is NOT THAT INTERESTING!!!

I would really appreciate some other opinions – this class is full of smart, interesting people, so if someone could please clue me in to Twitter, I would most certainly listen! (More than 140 characters is perfectly fine)

Turning a Blog into a Business

As a precursor to the upcoming class focused on Technorati.com, I decided to do a little research. The site recently posted its annual report called “State of the Blogosphere” (and, strangely, that word, blogosphere, did not trip up my spell check).

Some fun statistics:

• Bloggers post some 900,000 posts per day
• Bloggers with 100,000+ views per month earn an average of $75,000 annually (a somewhat skewed figure, because the top few blogs earn much more than that)

Some of the biggest blogging money makers are Perez Hilton (celebrity gossip raking in $111,000 per month) and Overheard in New York (quotes that the author hears on the streets of NYC while earning $8K per month). Some of technorati.com’s other big money makers are just regular guys and gals blogging about their lives without specific purpose.

Making money on a blog is becoming easier than ever. The Amazon Associates program gives you a referral fee if someone buys a product from a click-through on your blog, and Google can analyze your site, places relevant ads and give you a spif for every click.

When your blog is making money, and you’re beginning to rely on that income to live, your life pressures are different. Namely, blog and blog often. The revenue stream from ads is entirely dependent on traffic to your website. If you decide to slack off and go on vacation for a week, your traffic slows way down and ads start to be pulled.

While the idea of making money writing about something I personally enjoy for a full time job is enticing (my personal fantasy includes rolling out of bed way past 7am, making my way slowly to the nearest coffee shop, drinking latte after latte, happily posting about my thoughts and feelings for a couple hours and promptly taking the rest of the day off) the pressure to remain popular is difficult for me to really wrap my head around. I think I’ll wait to begin my blog career until after payment via the “click” method expires and bloggers are paid by the genius of their words – a world in which I’m bound to be much more successful!

Mounting a Hacker Attack

An interesting article appeared on Time.com last week about the development of those pesky security questions that appear on virtually every website that requires a log-in process.



http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1843984,00.html?xid=rss-business



The article focused on a recent hacking into Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account. Someone claiming to be the hacker posted their tactics online:



1. Go to email account that you wish to hack.

2. Click on "Forgot password"

3. When security questions appear, use Wikipedia, the US Postal Service website and online newspaper archives to find the answers to the questions provided.

4. Read your victim's email, and if they happen to be a public figure, post screen shots on Wikileaks.



A couple colliding forces made this hack possible - Yahoo's security questions were biographical, which made their answers easy to retrieve, and Sarah Palin is a public figure and has lots of public data, including a wikipedia page from which to garner general information. Despite this easily avoidable instance, many websites are looking to make their security questions more sophisticated, asking "What is your favorite historical figure?" or "What country do you want to visit?" While these questions are much more difficult to hack (unless you post such information on your public blog or Facebook page), the answers are also difficult to remember. I don't personally have a favorite historical figure and if I picked one for the sake of a security question, you bet that I would forget it immediately, unless I taped a Post-It to my computer screen, thereby entirely defeating the purpose.


Given our recent class discussions about security and privacy, this topic hits home for me because I struggle with the best way to use security questions on many websites. Before the industry as a whole is able to improve internet security on a larger scale, some suggestions for security questions are to add a number at the end of a word (i.e. maidenname1) or spell words backwards (i.e. tops for your dog Spot). It's not Sarah Palin's fault that she picked easy to remember facts about her life; nor is it Yahoo's fault for offering those questions. This just demonstrates a potentially larger problem and will require much more time and effort to fix.